What Worried the Crows?

Abstract

A well-known epigram by Callimachus on the philosopher Diodorus Cronus (fr. 393 Pfeiffer) reads as follows:The question of the third line, while perhaps recondite from a contemporary perspective, was clear in antiquity. The crows are asking ‘What follows (from what)?’, in allusion to the Hellenistic disputes concerning the truth conditions of conditional propositions (συνημμ⋯να), disputes in which the views of Diodorus figured prominently.I agree with Sedley that the question of the last line is ‘much more problematic’. The common interpretation has been to read the αὖθι as a form of αὖθις and to interpret it temporally. The result, in Pfeiffer's estimation, is ‘quomodo posthac erimus?’.This interpretation derives from Sextus Empiricus' discussion at M. 1.309–12 of the last two lines of the epigram. After crediting the grammarian with the ability to understand the allusion in the crows' first question (M. 1.310: κα⋯ μ⋯χρι τούτου συνήσει τ⋯ κα⋯ παιδίοις γνώριμον), he proceeds to argue that the philosopher has a better chance than the grammarian of understanding the second question. But, to quote Sedley, Sextus ‘makes a ghastly mess of it’ when he attempts his own elucidation. According to an argument of Diodorus, a living thing does not die in the time in which it lives nor in a time in which it does not live. Hence, Sextus concludes, it must be the case that it never dies and, ‘if this is the case, we are always living and, according to him, we shall come to be hereafter (αὖθις γενησόμεθα)’ (M. 1.312).